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Something was using all of my upstream bandwidth, wasn’t sure what device or who it was (had friends over). To get to the bottom of it quickly, a simple command can be run from the DD-WRT web-based gui that will show all network connections on your DD-WRT router.

Just follow these 5 easy steps below:

1. Login to your router’s web interface.

2. Click the “Administration” tab, and then click the “Commands” tab.

3. In the text area to enter commands, enter this:

cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack

4. Click the “Run Commands” button below where you entered the command above.

Once you’ve clicked the “Run Commands” button, wait a few seconds, and you’ll eventually see some output similar to what you see in the image above, below is the raw text from the image:

Now the key to tracking down the offending user/device is to look for a source IP (almost always a non-routable IP, like 192.168.1.x, 10.10.10.x or whatever) that shows up a LOT more often than other non-routable IP’s.

Once you’ve found that IP, go to the “Status” tab in the DD-WRT web interface, click “LAN”, find the IP that you suspected was the culprit from above and make a note of the MAC address associated with that IP.

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I recently came across a situation where a client reached their disk usage limit. As a result, they were unable to receive emails. This went un-noticed for a couple days (I didn’t manage the server at the time, I do now).

Bounce list stores events of delivery failures due to permanent recipient mailbox errors such as non-existent mailbox. Soft bounces (for example, mailbox is full) and other failures (for example, ESP rejects an email because it thinks it is spam) are not added to the list.

Subsequent delivery attempts to an address found in a bounce list are prevented to protect your sending reputation.

I first noticed the bounce issue in the logs, like in the image below. After not being able to find a way to manage email addresses on the bounce list from the browser, I hit up Google and was pleased to find that you can interact with Mailgun bounce lists via their API.

Show Email Addresses in the Mailgun Bounce List

To list email addresses on the bounce list, do something like this on the terminal/command line, replacing key-xxx-xxx with your actual Mailgun API key:

You can find your Mailgun API key on the Mailgun dashboard, under API Keys. The Mailgun API will return JSON, which is a bit difficult to read in the terminal. I usually copy the output and paste it into this JSON formatter, which makes the data much easier to read, as you can see in the screenshot above.

Even when the formatted JSON in it’s raw form is easier to read. See, here’s the returned JSON, in it’s original form:

Much easier to read, right? Those of you using REST clients like Postman will have your results automatically prettified, removing the need using a site like the JSON formatter I typically use.

Delete an Email Address from the Mailgun Bounce List

If you’ve found an email address you’d like to remove from the Mailgun bounce list, or already know the email you want to remove, do this from a terminal and replace [email protected] with the real email address to delete. And of course, replace key-xxx-xxx with your actual Mailgun API key:

Add an Email Address to the Mailgun Bounce List

Sometimes you may wish to manually add an email address to the Mailgun bounce list. This can be done very easily with the CURL command below. It will add [email protected] to the Mailgun bounce list, so make sure to change that to the email you really want to add to the list.

What Else?

Not much concerning Mailgun bounce lists specifically. It’s possible to add multiple addresses to a bounce list at once, but that gets a little more difficult from the terminal as it requires sending JSON to the Mailgun API. Using a client like Postman would be a better option if you intend on sending much data.

The Mailgun API can be used to do all sorts of stuff, like pull stats and to create new domains. It’s a powerful API and one of my favorites to work with.

Leonard setup some JS for my site for a quick test and gave me all the necessary code in a shared Google Doc. Took all of 5 minutes to get setup.

You can see it in action at the end of every post here at longren.io. It appears at the very end of every post, but only when viewing an individual post. The button looks like this:

Is RemindToRead Ready For Production?

Getting closer, just from the changes I saw on the dashboard today and the very straight-forward registration process. Signup requires minimal effort. Just enter your email, choose a password, receive an email containing a confirmation link, click the confirmation link, update password, and continue on with setup. A temporary email sent after user signup can be seen below.

The current iteration of the dashboard is not quite finished, but is very functional as it stands, even it’s early stages. It provides easy to follow instructions for adding RemindToRead code to your website. Just include some JavaScript and add this little snippet where you want the RemindToRead button to show:

<a href="#" class="later-button-el"></a>

Here’s what the dashboard currently looks like:

I simply added the code above to my relevant template file so that it’s displayed at the end of every post, but is only shown when viewing a single post. So you won’t see the button on archive pages, tags pages, category pages, search results, etc.

A WordPress Plugin Coming

A GitHub repo already exists for a WordPress plugin, I’ve not tried it out yet, but plan to later today and will report back. I know there’s been a lot of core changes to RemindToRead recently, the WordPress plugin may have some catching up to do.

The plugin looks pretty solid code-wise, after a real quick glance. Sounds like Leonard may want me to maintain the WordPress plugin, should be a piece of cake once the core of everything starts to take its final shape.

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A Dockerfile That Provides Quick WordPress Development Environments

Back in May of this year I started playing around with Docker quite a bit. Took me a bit to wrap my brain around everything Docker can do, wish I had read this article from Adam Ierymenko before starting.

Anyway, Docker describes itself as such:

Docker is an open platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications. It gives programmers, development teams and operations engineers the common toolbox they need to take advantage of the distributed and networked nature of modern applications.

I’m not using Docker to it’s fullest extent, not even close. I mostly use it for setting up quick WordPress development environments for building client sites or just to do some testing.

I came across an outdated Dockerfile that had exactly what I needed but lacked the ability to SSH to the Docker container. I forked it on GitHub and added some modifications (like SSH).

It’s on the Docker Hub Registry, making it super easy to use. There’s a few items on the to-do list, but the one I want to take care of first is adding support for Docker Compose, which will make installation even easier.

To get started with this Docker image, you just need to have Docker installed and then run the following command:

sudo docker pull tlongren/docker-wordpress-nginx-ssh:latest

Once you’ve got the Docker image pulled, fire up a new container like with the command below. It will create a new Docker container named project-name.

Give it a bit to get everything setup then navigate to http://127.0.0.1:80 in your browser to access your new WordPress install.

For more information I suggest checking out the readme. Every time that I push commits to GitHub, a new build of the Docker image will automatically be built as I’ve got it setup as an automated build repository at the Docker Hub Registry. Pretty nifty.

So, I’m relatively new to Docker, if you’re a pro and see something I should be doing differently, please let me know. Any advice on setting up Docker Compose for this project would be great, too (if I’m not mistaken, it just involved linking multiple containers together).

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Going to try Cloudbric here for a while to see how exactly it compares to Cloudflare

Longren.io will be unavailable for possibly up to 48 hours. As soon as I’ve published this post, I’ll be updating my nameservers to point to Cloudbric, almost feels like cheating on Cloudflare, they’ve been very good to me.

I’ve been using Cloudflare for quite a while, nearly since it became available to the public. I love them and all the services they provide, especially with a Pro (or Enterprise) account. Cloudflare costs money though (if you want certain added protections), and many smaller websites don’t use a lot of bandwidth and aren’t provided the protections they should receive with Cloudflare.

Cloudbric aims to solve that by providing all the features Cloudflare provides (from what I’ve been told at least) for free as long as your site doesn’t use more than 4GB of bandwidth per month. I only have a few Pro sites with Cloudflare (longren.io being one of them), but am trying to cut back on the number of online services I pay for monthly, so this makes sense on a financial level if nothing else.

I’d never heard of Cloudbric until they got in touch with me via direct message on Twitter and introduced me to their services. They appear to provide everything that Cloudflare’s Enterprise service provides, glad they saw one of my tweets praising Cloudflare and decided to get in touch.

Cloudbric has been around for a while (15 years or so I believe) and I talked to one of their reps quite a bit about how what they provide is better than Cloudflare (other than the usage based cost, of course).

Here’s what he said:

1. Unlike other website protection services including Cloudflare, Cloudbric provides full-coverage website protection. Even though Web Application Firewall (WAF) and DDoS Protection features are crucial for website protection, these options cost at least $200/month from Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s free plan does not protect web application layer 3, 4, and 7, which makes it pointless.

2. Our usage-based plan, rather than options plan, allows even free users to enjoy the most comprehensive security service. There are no charges for extra add-ons or features for more security. Users can enjoy all the features for FREE up to 4GB of traffic monthly.

Here’s a handy table from the Cloudbric website showing a feature comparison with similar providers like Cloudflare, Sitelock, and Incapsula.

FEATURES

Cloudbric

Incapsula

SiteLock

Cloudflare

Advanced DDoS Protection(Layer 3, 4, 7)

FREE

$299 /mo

Enterprise

$200 /mo

PCI-Certified Web Application Firewall(WAF)

FREE

$59 /mo

$299 /mo

$20 /mo

Global Content Delivery Network

FREE

$19 /mo

$99 /mo

$20 /mo

Web Opimization

FREE

$19 /mo

$99 /mo

$200 /mo

OWASP Core Rule Set

FREE

$59 /mo

$99 /mo

$20 /mo

Reputation-based Threat Protection

FREE

$59 /mo

$299 /mo

FREE

Board Spam Protection

FREE

$59 /mo

X

X

Block Visitors by IP or country

FREE

$59 /mo

X

FREE

Login Protection

FREE

$59 /mo

X

X

SSL Support

FREE

$19 /mo

FREE

FREE

Figured I’d try it out on this site as it gets the most traffic out of my personal sites, and if everything’s cool, I’ll eventually be moving all clients over to Cloudbric. Just wish they had a way to import existing DNS records, some of my domain names have at least 50 sub-domains.

Longren.io subscribers will get this post via email, but longren.io could be down for up to 48 hours while stuff updates. I’ll update this post or maybe write a new one after I’ve used Cloudbric for a few days. You should at least check them out, especially if you’re using Cloudflare for a site that doesn’t get enough traffic to make it worth paying for.

Update: After updating nameservers for longren.io to Cloudbric, an SSL issue was found. I went back to Cloudflare immediately, and within about an hour Cloudbric’s engineering team had a solution worked out. It sounds like they’ll be rolling the fix out on Monday June 29. So until then, longren.io will be on Cloudflare. I’ll post info about the issue in detail after Cloudbric has officially announced it or made the fix active.